Edward Thomas: Selected Poems

Long regarded as a ‘poet’s poet’, Edward Thomas is now
acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the English
countryside, his verse grounded in a pastoral patriotism that
makes him unique among the poets of the First World War.

Born in Lambeth, London, in 1878, Thomas studied at Lincoln
College, Oxford, before moving in 1901 to Kent and later
Hampshire with his wife, Helen. An admirer of Richard
Jefferies, he began writing topographical prose whilst still at
school, but financial pressures would later force him to lay aside
his literary ambitions to pursue the ‘painful business’ of reviewing
and writing books on commission.

A gifted critic, particularly of poetry, Thomas was quick to
praise the brilliance of W. H. Davies, Ezra Pound and Robert
Frost. It was Frost, whom Thomas met in 1913, who first recognised
the latent poetry in Thomas’s nature writing, and urged
him to try his hand at verse. The result was spectacular. Frost
had opened a floodgate of creativity, and in less than three years
Thomas wrote no fewer than 144 poems of extraordinary
maturity of style and lyrical intensity.

He joined the Artists Rifles in July 1915, his anti-nationalism
finally overcome by a need to protect the land he loved and by
reading ‘The Road Not Taken’, a poem Frost wrote about him.
Thomas was killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras, Easter
Monday 1917, while the first edition of his Poems was being prepared
for press.

Production Details

Limited to 1250 numbered copies each signed by David Gentleman

9 original lithographs and 9 letterpress vignettes by David Gentleman, printed by Curwen Studio

Bound by LEGO in Indian goatskin with paste-paper sides by Victoria Hall

Typeset in Monotype Bembo by Stan Lane at Gloucester Typesetting Services and printed letterpress at The Stonehouse Fine Press

118 pages

Slipcase covered in Freelife Merida, blocked in gold with a design by the artist

9¾˝ x 7˝

A unique poetic vision of the English landscape

Poised between Georgian lyricism and stark modernism,
Edward Thomas’s verse consistently defies classification. Like
his Victorian and Georgian counterparts, he was a celebrant of
the profound beauty to be found in the natural world, but his
faith in the plain rhythms of speech and his intensity of vision
mark him out as an influential precursor of W. H. Auden and
Ted Hughes, who referred to him as ‘the father of us all’. One of
Britain’s most important poets, Thomas represents, as former
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion astutely observes in his introduction
to this volume, ‘a kind of hinge, connecting British
poetry with its tradition while swinging it forward to feed our
own time’.

Thomas’s eye for the English landscape was unrivalled, and his
loving attention to moments of distilled beauty – the ‘thin
gilding beam’ of a February sun, ‘waters running frizzled over
gravel’, the ‘roar of parleying starlings’ – infuses his poetry.
Many such details have their roots in his earlier prose writings,
or the notebook jottings made on his many walks in the country.
But his poems, were all composed in ‘a hurry and a whirl’
in the last two years of his life, while he was preoccupied with
the war in Europe and plagued with indecision about whether
to enlist. In his verse his appreciation of the richness and beauty
of the natural world is ‘salted and sobered’, tinged by an awareness
of its potential loss.

In his bleak and oblique ruminations, images of light and darkness,
life and death contend as Thomas uses the natural landscape to point to the unnatural war: a ‘fallen elm’ stands in for
a fallen man in ‘As the team’s head-brass’, the strewn blossoms
in ‘The Cherry Trees’ are a reminder of a wedding ‘when there
is none to wed’, and in ‘Rain’ ‘Myriads of broken reeds all still
and stiff ’ are likened to the dead, and the living, in France.
As Motion writes, Thomas’s poems, unusual in their approach
to the conflict, ‘experience the war as an organic event, a tremor
through nature’.

But Thomas’s poetry is also concerned with the individual, and
in particular the poet’s own feelings of self-doubt and uncertainty.
Poems rarely resolve, and the dual perspectives in verses
such as ‘The Other’ and ‘The Signpost’ suggest a mind that is
still deliberating, still ‘Wondering where he shall journey’.
Elsewhere, as in his most famous poem, ‘Adlestrop’, or the
softly powerful ‘Old Man’, there is a notion that knowledge
is ungraspable, or lost. The poet has ‘mislaid the key’, and sees
‘Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end’.
This selection closes with a draft poem, ‘The sorrow of true
love’, and a handful of notes from Thomas’s war diary. The
latter, breaking off in mid-sentence, are a poignant reminder
that, at the time of his death, Edward Thomas was a poet who
had only just found his voice.

Traditional crafts of paper and print

Hand-patterned paste-papers, valued for their durability and
beauty, have a long tradition as a material for bookbinding. In a
process that has seen little change in the hundreds of years since
it was first used, sheets of paper, after being dampened and left
a short while to rest, are brushed with a coloured starch paste
produced by cooking a combination of flours. A pattern is then
worked into the paste, using a variety of handmade tools and
combs. The papers, at their most fragile at this stage, are put aside
to air-dry for several hours before being pressed and patterned
again. Once dry, they are flattened in a cast-iron standing press.

For this volume, Victoria Hall has drawn inspiration from the
landscape that inspired Thomas’s poetry. Experimenting with
several textures and various shades of green, she developed
an organic design, embodying natural rather than geometric
forms. The result is wonderfully redolent – in texture and
colour – of the grass and moss of the English countryside.
Each paper is unique, mirroring in design and form the endless
complexity to be found in nature.

The distinctive qualities of letterpress have long been appreciated
by lovers and collectors of fine books. Like poetry itself,
letterpress editions appeal to the senses: the smell of the ink
on the page, the feel of the grain in the paper and the slight
impression left by the hot-metal type. The simple elegance of
a letterpress page belies the skill that the medium demands.
A labour-intensive process, the task of setting and printing this
edition fell to Stan Lane, a master compositor with 60 years’
experience of the craft. Printed on a classic mould-made paper,
the text has been generously set, allowing the poetry room to
breathe, and providing a clarity and intensity of line perfectly
at one with Thomas’s verse.

About David Gentleman

David Gentleman’s work as an artist and illustrator, spanning a
career of more than 60 years, is rooted in the English artistic
tradition. Born in 1930, he studied illustration under Edward
Bawden and John Nash at the Royal College of Art, a time that
instilled an appreciation for craft, design and the pastoral that is
everywhere evident in Gentleman’s art. He has worked across
an exceptionably wide range of formats: his wood engravings
have appeared on the covers of numerous Penguin editions
as well as a 100-metre-long mural at Charing Cross London
Underground station; he is the designer of more than 100
stamps for the British Post Office; and his watercolours and
lithographs feature in countless publications.

Like Thomas, Gentleman has a particular talent for capturing
the spirit of a place, and much of his creative output springs
from his close observation of the natural world made on his
own country walks, particularly around his house in Suffolk.
His work for Edward Thomas: Selected Poems prompted him to
tread in Thomas’s footsteps, travelling to Steep in Hampshire
to sketch the house Thomas describes in ‘The Manor Farm’.
Gentleman’s beeches are based on those on the hillside behind
the farm, while the trees for his ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’
lithograph are portraits of ‘old friends in Suffolk’.

As Gentleman himself acknowledges, poetry offers an artist
a specific challenge; artwork should accompany rather than
illustrate verse, reflecting tone and atmosphere without ‘stepping
on the toes of the poem’. Gentleman’s lithographs, quietly
fresh and intricately detailed, do just this, while the gently
recurring imagery of pathways and trails are evocative of the
roads taken – and not taken – that were such a dominant feature
of Thomas’s life and work.

Autolithography

The printing process of lithography (literally, drawing on
stone) was invented in 1796, and quickly became recognised as
the best method of reproducing works of art and other images
in colour. Highly skilled craftsmen would interpret an original
image by eye, drawing separations of different colours which
were then re-combined on the printing press to create a faithful
reproduction of the original.

In the early 20th century a number of artists in Europe and
America began to experiment with producing their own colour
separations, creating in the process a new artistic medium,
in which translucent colours could be overprinted to striking
effect. Thus autolithography was born; its practitioners in
Britain included Eric Ravilious, Elisabeth Frink, Henry Moore
and – technically the finest of all – Barnett Freedman.
When making a lithograph, the artist works directly on the
printing medium (be it stone, zinc plate or film) and therefore
every image is an original print, not a reproduction of a pre-existing work. This gives lithographs – and books containing them – a particularly strong appeal to collectors, especially
when signed by the artist as this one is.

David Gentleman is a central figure in the British tradition of
autolithography. Among his earliest work was a contribution
to the Lyons lithographs series, alongside Edward Bawden,
John Piper and others, and he has continued to return to this
medium throughout his long creative life.

Reviews

"This second in the WW1 poets LE series forms an intriguing contrast with the first, devoted to Rupert Brooke. To start with the slipcase, this time the design eschews the small pasted lithograph in fa..." [read more]

"This second in the WW1 poets LE series forms an intriguing contrast with the first, devoted to Rupert Brooke. To start with the slipcase, this time the design eschews the small pasted lithograph in favour of a wrap-around gold-blocked version of one of the artist David Gentleman’s designs. Both are beautiful, so as far as I am concerned honours are even here, but moving on to the book cover itself I find Victoria Hall’s dark green pastepaper design this time around rather less distinctive than the overlapping pattern of blue, brown and buff waves that adorns the Brooke (incidentally, the dark green leather quarter-binding for Thomas is much finer-textured than the dark blue Brooke – the latter is bolder and for me a little more distinctive). The paper for both volumes is described as “Zerkall mould-made smooth”, but the Brooke is creamier in colour and slightly smoother to the touch. The main difference between the two volumes (apart of course from the very different artistic styles of Ed Kluz and David Gentleman) is that while the Brooke was set in Monotype Walbaum, Thomas has Monotype Bembo. Both are elegant and completely appropriate, but Walbaum has much finer thins and more delicate serifs, and I wonder if the change was made to render less obvious any variable intensity from page to page in the letterpress printing, as was noticeable in my copy of the Brooke. Certainly I don’t see any sign if it here. Re Kluz and Gentleman, they are so utterly contrasted that comparison is impossible. I love them both, though maybe Kluz’s bold modern style is more appropriate for the younger poet, as opposed to the more pastoral Gentleman/Thomas combination. As before, the small word of warning that the given page count of 118 conceals the fact that there are only 66 pages actually devoted to the poems (I notice that since I reviewed Brooke, the page count on its website page has gone down to a more accurate 88!). All in all, a fabulous second volume in the series, and I can’t wait to see how the remaining poets are tackled in graphic and artistic terms." [hide full review]